The Value of the Research Data Alliance to Organisations performing Research

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17 December 2018 26359 reads

Engaging with the Research Data Alliance

The Value of the Research Data Alliance to Organisations Performing Research

 

The Research Data Alliance offers many solutions and benefits for organisations performing research and their staff:

•    As a bottom-up, international organisation with multi-disciplinary and multi domain data professionals collaborating to identify and create research data interoperability solutions, the Research Data Alliance offers a neutral forum for the creation of open, international agreements on technical, social and governance mechanisms for research data interoperability – this enables an organisation to shape, gain early access to and adopt agreements in areas that are crucial to its purposes;
•    RDA is a global platform and network offering a unique opportunity to interact and collaborate with leading organisations, institutes and funders – this enables organisations to extend and sustain their international network and key staff at the institution to engage with the best in the world on organisational best practice and policies in open science and research data management;
•    Many fields of research depend on being able to locate, understand and reuse data produced elsewhere. RDA groups produce guidelines, tools, methods and infrastructures to make this process efficient and develop the skills necessary to use them, giving organisations an advantage in speed and efficiency of research, and the capacity to share, check and expand their guidelines for best practices in managing the data lifecycle;
•    Access to an international forum that facilitates the harmonisation, integration and/or implementation of standards and methods for data interoperability;
•    Opportunities to partner with expertise to augment specific communities of interest and corresponding data interoperability solutions;
•    A means of managing institutional risk with regard to data management and data quality obligations of a research performing organisation;
•    Access to an extraordinary network of international colleagues and organisations with a broad set of experiences, perspectives, practices, and intellectual frameworks relevant to data-driven innovation.
 

 

 

 

The Research Data Alliance’s vision is Researchers and innovators openly sharing data across technologies, disciplines, and countries to address the grand challenges of society

The Research Data Alliance (RDA) is a community-driven organization whose mission is to develop the social and technical data infrastructure needed to drive innovation surrounding data sharing and data interoperability.  Established in 2013, RDA supports more than 9,615 international members representing 137 countries (January 2020), has generated 32 concrete outputs (eight of which are recognized as European ICT technical specifications) with over 75 documented adoption cases (January 2020).
The Research Data Alliance enables data to be shared across barriers through outputs developed by focused Working Groups and Interest Groups, formed of volunteer experts from around the world and drawn from academia, private sector and government. Participation in RDA is open to anyone who agrees to its guiding principles of openness, consensus, balance, harmonisation, with a community driven and non-profit approach.
RDA has a grass-roots, inclusive approach covering all data lifecycle stages, engaging data producers, users and stewards, addressing data exchange, processing, and storage. It has succeeded in creating the neutral social platform where international research data experts meet to exchange views and to agree on topics including social hurdles on data sharing, education and training challenges, data management plans and certification of data repositories, disciplinary and interdisciplinary interoperability, as well as technological aspects

 

GETTING ENGAGED WITH THE RESEARCH DATA ALLIANCE

What format does engagement come under?

•    Supporter / Sponsor agreements are defined directly between the RDA Foundation (legal representative of RDA) and the organisation in question;
•    Organisational members [1]  sign an agreement with RDA Foundation (legal representative of RDA) and pay an annual fee based on the number of employees (< than 50 employees: USD1,000 per year | 50 and <250 employees: USD2,000 per year | >250 employees: USD10,000 per year)

Participate:

•    Get your staff involved in the Working and Interest Groups of relevance to you https://www.rd-alliance.org/groups
•    As an organisational member, you can participate in the Organisational Assembly and even be elected to the Organisational Advisory Board 
•    Propose a new group to discuss and resolve a research data challenge that you are facing https://www.rd-alliance.org/creating-and-managing-rda-groups.html 
•    Follow and contribute to the discipline specific areas of interest to your organisation on the RDA web site https://rd-alliance.org/rda-disciplines 
•    Leverage on the RDA web platform to promote your organisation’s research data related events and news https://rd-alliance.org/node/52346 / ~ https://rd-alliance.org/node/52347 

Attend:
•   Engage with the RDA Community at the RDA biannual Plenary meetings https://www.rd-alliance.org/plenaries 

Adopt / Implement:
•    Adopt an RDA Recommendation or Output https://www.rd-alliance.org/recommendations-and-outputs/all-recommendati...
•    Understand the research data interoperability solutions available for implementation in your organisation https://rd-alliance.org/recommendations-and-outputs/all-recommendations-and-outputs
•    Follow and / or repurpose the 23 (research data) Things programme for your organisation http://www.ands.org.au/working-with-data/skills/23-research-data-things

 

For the full RDA Value statement for Organisations performing Research click here

For the RDA Value for Organisations performing Research Powerpoint click here